


On the Count of 8

by Arsoemon



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mild Blood, Obsessive-Compulsive, One Shot, Shukita - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27217843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsoemon/pseuds/Arsoemon
Summary: Day 6: What Lies BeneathA routine palace infiltration goes horribly wrong.
Relationships: Kitagawa Yusuke/Kurusu Akira, Kitagawa Yusuke/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25
Collections: Shukita Halloween





	On the Count of 8

“Grab the treasure!” Mona yells as if Joker needed the reminder, as if this isn’t second nature now. Joker takes advantage of the nearest column’s proximity to the railing, scaling the wall before launching himself outward to snatch the scroll out of the air. He tucks and rolls to stick the landing.

“Oracle, take the lead. Everyone out!” He orders as cracks start creeping up the opulent walls. He takes a mental count: 2, 4, all seven of his thieves. And Akechi.

As they retrace their infiltration route, Joker follows behind, keeping an eye on everyone. They’ve just hit a sharp turn when he sees the tell-tale sign of Skull’s knee bothering him and pulls him back up just before he can hit the ground.

“Sorry!” Ryuji calls as he regains his footing. Akira takes another mental count. Seven. And Akechi.

“We’re almost there!” Oracle calls before turning another corner. “Shoot! Dead end!” The vent they’d been using to come and go is buried in debris.

“There!” Noir spies a newly formed hole in the wall. It will take some climbing, but this room is almost designed like a video game map with convenient stacks of crates and bookshelves all around. Skull and Crow scale the boxes with ease and wait on the platform to help Panther, Queen, and Noir up after them. With everyone else near the exit, Joker and Fox start pulling themselves up.

One of the lower boxes slips, knocking them both off balance.

“Yusuke!” Akira calls after realizing the boy is no longer near him.

“I am alright! I will find another way.” Fox runs to the far side of the room. Joker can already see his plan and pulls himself the rest of the way up to go and meet him at the top of the broken curved staircase. There’s a massive section of steps missing, and a fall from this height would surely break bones at the least. But Fox shows no sign of slowing down. In fact he’s speeding up. Joker braces himself as Fox leaps at the very last possible second.

They cling to each other for only a moment as Joker pulls him away from the edge, barely even taking time to catch their breath before they’re up and running. The others have already made it outside.

There’s a weak spot in the catwalk and Yusuke’s foot slips through, the sudden fall knocking the wind out of him. Akira tries to pull him up as quickly and carefully as the situation will allow. He’s nearly free when one of the heavy overhead lights snaps loose.

Yusuke shoves Akira away hard enough for him to slip out of the opening, barely grabbing the ledge in time to avoid the deadly drop.

“Fox!” He pulls himself back up, narrowly missing a blow to the face by the free-falling light. “Fox!” He calls but doesn’t see him where he was caught just a moment ago. “Fox?” He looks around wildly, panic setting in with each second.

And then he sees.

Akira scrambles back into the building. “Yu-Yusuke?” He’s on the floor, at least twenty feet below, lying perfectly still, his white mask in sharp contrast to the deep red pool in which it lies. Akira is about to leap after him when he seems to be moving backward.

“We have to go!” He’s being dragged away. They need to wait, he has to go back for him. But no words, no sound, no air will come out for him to say so. The familiar sensation of stepping between worlds doesn’t hit him like usual. The Nav says something or other about the destination being deleted, but he can still see blood-soaked blue hair on the black and white checkered marble floor.

“Dude what were you doing?” Ryuji is first to ask as everyone catches their breath.

Akira stands slowly, reluctant to turn around, to look and see that his worst fears have come true. He counts. 2, 4, 6- Akechi makes seven. He counts again. Six and Akechi. He tries one more time, knowing it’s pointless. His eyes sting as his vision blurs with tears.

“Joker...” comes Ann’s concerned voice.

“Six...” he finishes his count at a low whisper. There’s a gasp from his left, someone approaching him from the right, and a yell coming from somewhere he can’t identify. It’s not until his lungs burn for air, his balled fists brace against the ground that he realizes it’s from him.

They’d lost Yusuke, and there’s no way to get him back.

•

For days, Akira is too overwhelmed to talk, and no one else is forcing the matter. He only ventures downstairs when he absolutely must. His eyes look anywhere but at the wall by the door.

Sojiro tries to help, offering well-intentioned platitudes about it not being his fault and how the art boy wouldn’t want him to live like this. Akira knows he means well and tries to accept his kindness. But the sad attempt at a smile he gives never reaches his eyes. How could it when he’d failed as a leader, as a friend, as a lover? He was supposed to take care of him.

He’s doing the dishes one day when Futaba walks in. It’s quiet for a long while before Sojiro gently calls her. Akira’s eyes sting with the tears he has up until this moment yet to shed.

“Sojiro?” Futaba’s voice is shaky. “Do you think... d... you think that they’re together again now?” The older man gives some soft-spoken answer. What that answer is Akira will never know. A mug slips from his limp hand, making a loud, shrill rattling noise before shattering at his feet.

“I’m sorry,” Akira can’t meet his gaze.

“It’s alright. Just be careful not to hurt yourself. I’ll get the broom.”

On the nights he’s called from sleep by Igor, he can’t help but notice all the cell doors are still open. Except one. In the pit of his stomach, he knows whose cell it is, but the darkness inside is impenetrable from this distance. Maybe he just doesn’t want to know.

When he dreams, it’s of Yusuke. His smile; the way he looked at him when he thought Akira couldn’t see; his strength of character, mind, and body; his eyes half open and unseeing as he lay on the floor. It’s at this point he usually bolts awake, shaking in a cold sweat. He rises to pace and weep in a silence broken only by the counting under his breath—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8—to avoid sleep and Morgana’s questions.

It’s one of these dreams turned nightmare that signals the shift. It goes through the same motions—everything he loves about Yusuke, all the fun they’d had, the trust, all leading to how he’d let him down. But he doesn’t wake up at just the sight this time.

Akira watches as Yusuke’s body stirs. He looks up directly at Akira and weakly extends a hand, his face is tired as if he’d simply fallen asleep at the easel again, but those eyes... so familiar and cold and inviting and _his_. Akira is bending his legs to jump when his alarm goes off.

This continues for almost a month, and Akira can swear he sees Yusuke everywhere but only in his periphery. Each night he gets just to the point of preparing to jump before he wakes again, counting and pacing his eight circles in the attic until he feels able to sleep again or it’s time to get dressed.

It’s a normal day of school, the Shujin thieves all noticing how their leader seems to have regained a bit of energy. Akira is walking home with Ann and Ryuji, the two half-heartedly discussing the homework they have to do tonight when he sees him and not just out of the corner of his eye. A tall, lean boy in a white button-down, his dark shoulder length hair framing his heavy eyes just so.

Akira turns to run to him and just like that fateful day, is pulled backward.

“Dude what the hell!” Ryuji yells as a line of cars passes right over the spot Akira would’ve been standing. Akira barely notices.

“He’s- Yusuke’s-“ he tries to explain, wanting to neither look away and lose sight of him—only to find that it’s yet another hallucination—nor see the looks of pity and concern the other two are surely giving him.

“I gotta go,” Akira turns and wanders through the subway station. His mind is focused solely on counting the entire walk—2, 4, 6, 8, 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, 4, 6, 8—and it’s not until Morgana clears his throat that Akira realizes where they are. He’s been standing by the wall in the underground walkway for quite some time. The 105 Mens sign looks much dimmer, much less inviting than before.

They take requests. It’s supposed to be to try to take everyone’s minds off of things, but it has the opposite effect for Akira. Here they are to save people, but he couldn’t even do the same for Yusuke.

After what felt like forever fighting Kali, the team is collapsed in an empty section of tunnel when Akira suddenly sits up as if awaking from a nightmare before taking off down the tracks.

“Joker!”

“Where are you going?!”

“Him! It’s- Fox!” They didn’t seem to notice, but as he was counting—6 and Akechi—there had been a seventh. Further in the shadows, he could see the stark white mask, tail, and boots.

“Joker, we need to leave!”

“That’s okay go on,” he calls over his shoulder, a wild glint in his eye visible with startling clarity even beneath his mask. Skull is first to go after him.

“Joker! Don’t you think we should regroup?” Makoto asks through panted breaths as they catch him stopped at a fork in the path, looking, listening.

“If we leave this area, we will never get back to it. If you want to leave, go home, get some rest. I’ll be back when I find him,” he turns to start down the left hall.

He reaches the end of the path just as Fox walks through a wall. Akira searches the surface and throws himself against it when he sees the cracks indicating a false wall. It doesn’t budge.

“Joker, seriously don’t run off like that!” Futaba scolds him.

“Mona,” he doesn’t seem to hear her. “Can you knock this down? Please?” He stands to the side, eagerly anticipating the moment the wall crumbles and he finds Yusuke on the other side.

“Joker-“ Akechi starts.

“Mona!” He yells far more forcefully than any of them have ever heard. “Please just... just turn into the bus.... Take down the wall. If... if he’s not... I’ll leave with you guys, but I have to know, I-“ he runs his fingers through his hair before reaching for the bag, searching for anything that’ll help him chisel away at the damned thing.

From over his shoulder, he hears the usual meowing and clattering of Mona transforming. He looks back to see Makoto in the driver’s seat, a sadness in her red eyes. She barely breaches the wall before Akira rushes in.

His heart drops through the floor. There’s nothing there but a chest and a shadow running for its life. The others watch in silence as Akira slowly strides over to the chest and picks the lock. He pulls the new sword out of the box and stares at it. There’s no sound, no movement not even from the desperate shadow. They’re all suspended in an agonizing stillness for a long while before Akira’s shoulders begin to heave under the pressure of a mirthless laugh melting into uncontrollable sobbing.

They hold off on requests after that. Akira hasn’t uttered a single word since, and he’s already skipped multiple days of school. Sojiro comes up to leave food that Akira puts back in the fridge after the man leaves for the night. His friends leave texts and voicemails he doesn’t bother answering since everyone seems to be ok besides wondering where the hell he is. No eating, no sleeping, no talking. Only counting. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7. Yusuke makes 8.

It’s 3 AM as he scrolls through the chat, barely reading the messages as he walks to the station. He didn’t even get the chance to dream tonight as sleep never took him to see Yusuke once more. He’d paced his eight circles, clockwise and counterclockwise at eight times each direction before he made up his mind.

He does his best to be inconspicuous as he waits for the first train to Shibuya, his primary concerns being Sojiro, Morgana, or a truancy officer finding him. He fakes a long phone call to the parents he hasn’t heard from in months, pacing another 8 circles as he “tells” them everything he wishes he could until the train finally rolls to a stop.

The messages have started again. Futaba must’ve found out he’s not at Leblanc by now. As the stop approaches, he closes the texts and starts up the Nav, activating it the moment he reaches their old people-watching spot. If the only way to get Yusuke back is to wander the depths of Hell indefinitely, then now is as good a time as any to start.


End file.
